''The Time Machine'' is a 2002 American

science fiction film Science fiction (or sci-fi) is a film genre that uses speculative, fictional science-based depictions of phenomena that are not fully accepted by mainstream science, such as extraterrestrial lifeforms, spacecraft, robots, cyborgs, interstellar ...

loosely adapted by John Logan from the 1895 novel of the same name by

H. G. Wells Herbert George Wells"Wells, H. G."
Revised 18 May 2015. ''

1960 film of the same name by David Duncan.

Arnold Leibovit Arnold Leibovit (born June 18, 1950) is an American director, producer, and screenwriter of feature films and musical productions. An acting member of the Producers Guild of America, he has produced, directed, and written several feature films. ...

served as executive producer and

Simon Wells Simon Finlay Wells (born 1961) is an English film director of animation and live-action films. He is the great-grandson of author H. G. Wells, and is best known for directing ''The Prince of Egypt'' with Brenda Chapman and Steve Hickner. Ea ...

, the great-grandson of the original author, served as director. The film stars

Guy Pearce Guy Edward Pearce (born 5 October 1967) is an Australian actor. Born in Ely, Cambridgeshire in England, and raised in Geelong, Victoria (Australia), Victoria in Australia, he started his career portraying Mike Young (Neighbours), Mike Young in ...

Orlando Jones Orlando Jones (born April 10, 1968) is an American stand-up comedian and actor. He is known for being one of the original cast members of the sketch comedy series ''MADtv'', for his role as the 7 Up spokesman from 1999 to 2002, and for his role a ...

Samantha Mumba Samantha Tamania Anne Cecilia Mumba (born 18 January 1983) is an Irish singer-songwriter, dancer, actress, fashion model and TV presenter. In 2000, at the age of 17, she shot to fame with the release of her debut single "Gotta Tell You", which ...

Mark Addy Mark Ian Addy (born 14 January 1964) is an English actor. His roles in British television include Detective Constable Gary Boyle in the sitcom '' The Thin Blue Line'' (1995–1996) and Hercules in the fantasy drama series ''Atlantis'' (2013–2 ...

, and

Jeremy Irons Jeremy John Irons (; born 19 September 1948) is an English actor and activist. After receiving classical training at the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School, Irons began his acting career on stage in 1969 and has appeared in many West End theatre ...

, and includes a cameo by

Alan Young Alan Young (born Angus Young; November 19, 1919 – May 19, 2016) was a British, Canadian and American actor, comedian, radio host and television host, whom ''TV Guide'' called "the Charlie Chaplin of television". His notable roles includ ...

, who also appeared in the 1960 film adaptation. The film is set in

New York City New York, often called New York City or NYC, is the List of United States cities by population, most populous city in the United States. With a 2020 population of 8,804,190 distributed over , New York City is also the L ...

instead of

London London is the capital and largest city of England and the United Kingdom, with a population of just under 9 million. It stands on the River Thames in south-east England at the head of a estuary down to the North Sea, and has been a majo ...

, and contains new story elements not present in the original novel nor the 1960 film adaptation, including a romantic backstory, a new scenario about how civilization was destroyed, and several new characters such as an artificially intelligent

hologram Holography is a technique that enables a wavefront to be recorded and later re-constructed. Holography is best known as a method of generating real three-dimensional images, but it also has a wide range of other Holography#Applications, applic ...

and a Morlock leader. The film received mixed reviews and grossed $123 million worldwide. It was nominated for the

Academy Award for Best Makeup The Academy Award for Best Makeup and Hairstyling is the Academy Award given to the best achievement in makeup and hairstyling for film. Traditionally, three films have been nominated each year with exceptions in the early 1980s and 2002 when the ...

(

John M. Elliot Jr. John M. Elliott Jr. is a makeup artist who was nominated at the 75th Academy Awards for Best Makeup. He was nominated for ''The Time Machine'', his nomination was shared with Barbara Lorenz Barbara Lorenz is a make-up artist who has done over 1 ...

and

Barbara Lorenz Barbara Lorenz is a make-up artist who has done over 110 films and TV shows. She was nominated at the 75th Academy Awards in the category of Best Makeup for the film ''The Time Machine''. She shared her nomination with John M. Elliott Jr. She a ...

) at the

75th Academy Awards The 75th Academy Awards ceremony, presented by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS) took place on March 23, 2003, at the Kodak Theatre in Hollywood, Los Angeles. During the ceremony, AMPAS presented Academy Awards (commonl ...

, but lost to ''

Frida ''Frida'' is a 2002 American biographical drama film directed by Julie Taymor which depicts the professional and private life of the surrealist Mexican artist Frida Kahlo. Starring Salma Hayek in an Academy Award–nominated portrayal as Kahl ...

''.

Plot

In 1899, Dr. Alexander Hartdegen is an inventor teaching at

Columbia University Columbia University (also known as Columbia, and officially as Columbia University in the City of New York) is a private research university in New York City. Established in 1754 as King's College on the grounds of Trinity Church in Manhatt ...

. Unlike his friend David Philby, Alexander would rather do pure research than work in the world of business. After a mugger kills his

fiancée An engagement or betrothal is the period of time between the declaration of acceptance of a marriage proposal and the marriage itself (which is typically but not always commenced with a wedding). During this period, a couple is said to be ''fi ...

Emma, he devotes himself to building a time machine that will allow him to travel back in time to save her. When he completes the machine four years later, he travels back to 1899 and prevents her murder, only to see her killed again when a

horseless carriage Horseless carriage is an early name for the car, motor car or automobile. Prior to the invention of the motor car, carriages were usually pulled by animals, typically horses. The term can be compared to other transitional terms, such as mobile ph ...

frightens the horses of a

horse-drawn vehicle A horse-drawn vehicle is a mechanized piece of equipment pulled by one horse or by a team of horses. These vehicles typically had two or four wheels and were used to carry passengers and/or a load. They were once common worldwide, but they have m ...

. Alexander realizes that any attempt to save Emma will result in her death through other circumstances. He travels to 2030 to discover whether science has been able to solve his question of how to change the past. At the

New York Public Library The New York Public Library (NYPL) is a public library system in New York City. With nearly 53 million items and 92 locations, the New York Public Library is the second largest public library in the United States (behind the Library of Congress ...

, a holographic

librarian A librarian is a person who works professionally in a library providing access to information, and sometimes social or technical programming, or instruction on information literacy to users. The role of the librarian has changed much over time, ...

called Vox 114 insists time travel to the past is impossible. Alexander travels to 2037, when the accidental destruction of the

Moon The Moon is Earth's only natural satellite. It is the fifth largest satellite in the Solar System and the largest and most massive relative to its parent planet, with a diameter about one-quarter that of Earth (comparable to the width of ...

by lunar colonists has begun rendering the Earth virtually uninhabitable. While restarting the time machine to avoid debris, he is knocked unconscious and travels forward to the date 16 July 802701 before reawakening. The human race has reverted to a primitive lifestyle and the Earth has healed. Some survivors, called "Eloi", live on the sides of cliffs of what was once

Manhattan Manhattan (), known regionally as the City, is the most densely populated and geographically smallest of the five boroughs of New York City. The borough is also coextensive with New York County, one of the original counties of the U.S. state ...

. Alexander is nursed back to health by a virtuous young woman named Mara, one of the few Eloi who speak English. He observes the broken moon and realises that maybe his teachings led to this future. One night, Alexander and Mara's younger brother, Kalen, dream of a frightening, jagged-toothed face and a creature calling their name. Alexander informs Mara of the dream and she tells him they all have that dream, and she notices that his watch is missing. The next day, the Eloi are attacked and Mara is dragged underground by

ape Apes (collectively Hominoidea ) are a clade of Old World simians native to sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia (though they were more widespread in Africa, most of Asia, and as well as Europe in prehistory), which together with its sister g ...

-like monsters. The creatures are called "Morlocks" and they hunt the Eloi for food. In order to rescue Mara, Kalen leads Alexander to Vox 114, which is still functional after 800,000 years. After learning from Vox how to find the Morlocks, Alexander enters their underground lair through an opening that resembles the face in his nightmare. He is captured and thrown into an area where Mara sits in a cage. Alexander meets an intelligent, humanoid Über-Morlock, who explains that Morlocks are the evolutionary descendants of the humans who went underground after the Moon broke apart, while the Eloi are evolved from those who remained on the surface. The Über-Morlocks are a caste of telepaths who rule the other Morlocks, and use the Eloi as breeding vessels for their Morlock offspring. The Über-Morlock explains that Alexander cannot alter Emma's fate; her death is what drove him to build the time machine in the first place, therefore saving her would be a virtual impossibility due to temporal paradox. The Über-Morlock shows Alexander and tells him to go home, having given him the answer he had been searching for. Alexander gets into the machine but pulls the Über-Morlock in with him, carrying them into the future as they fight. The Über-Morlock dies by rapidly aging when Alexander pushes him outside of the machine's temporal bubble. Alexander stops in 635,427,810, revealing a harsh, rust-colored sky over a wasteland of Morlock caves. Accepting that he cannot save Emma, Alexander travels back to rescue Mara. After freeing her, he starts the time machine and jams its gears, creating a violent distortion in time. Pursued by the Morlocks, Alexander and Mara escape to the surface as the time distortion explodes, killing the Morlocks and destroying their caves along with the time machine. Alexander begins a new life with Mara and the Eloi, while Vox 114 helps him educate them. In 1903, Philby and Mrs. Watchit, Alexander's housekeeper, are in his laboratory discussing his absence. Philby tells Mrs. Watchit he is glad that Alexander has gone to a place where he can find peace, then tells her that he would like to hire her as a housekeeper, which she accepts until Alexander returns. Mrs. Watchit bids Alexander farewell and Philby leaves, looking toward the laboratory affectionately, then throws his

bowler hat The bowler hat, also known as a billycock, bob hat, bombín (Spanish) or derby (United States), is a hard felt hat with a rounded crown, originally created by the London hat-makers Thomas and William Bowler in 1849. It has traditionally been worn ...

away in tribute to Alexander's objection to conformity.

Cast

as Dr. Alexander Hartdegen,

associate professor Associate professor is an academic title with two principal meanings: in the North American system and that of the ''Commonwealth system''. Overview In the ''North American system'', used in the United States and many other countries, it is a ...

applied mechanics Applied mechanics is the branch of science concerned with the motion of any substance that can be experienced or perceived by humans without the help of instruments. In short, when mechanics concepts surpass being theoretical and are applied and e ...

and

engineering Engineering is the use of scientific method, scientific principles to design and build machines, structures, and other items, including bridges, tunnels, roads, vehicles, and buildings. The discipline of engineering encompasses a broad rang ...

. In the novel, the time traveler's name isn't given. *

as Mara, a virtuous Eloi woman who befriends Alexander and eventually becomes his love interest. *

as Vox 114, a

holographic Holography is a technique that enables a wavefront to be recorded and later re-constructed. Holography is best known as a method of generating real three-dimensional images, but it also has a wide range of other Holography#Applications, applic ...

artificial intelligence Artificial intelligence (AI) is intelligence—perceiving, synthesizing, and inferring information—demonstrated by machines, as opposed to intelligence displayed by animals and humans. Example tasks in which this is done include speech re ...

librarian at the

in the future, who befriends Alexander. *

as David Philby, Alexander's good friend and conservative colleague. *

as The Über-Morlock, the leader of the Morlocks and a member of the

telepathic Telepathy () is the purported vicarious transmission of information from one person's mind to another's without using any known human sensory channels or physical interaction. The term was first coined in 1882 by the classical scholar Frederic ...

-ruling caste of the Morlock world. *

Sienna Guillory Sienna Tiggy Guillory (; born 16 March 1975) is an English actress and former model. She portrayed Jill Valentine in several entries of the ''Resident Evil'' action-horror film series. Other prominent roles include elf princess Arya Dröttningu ...

as Emma, Alexander's fiancée. *

Phyllida Law Phyllida Ann Law (born 8 May 1932) is a British actress, known for her numerous roles in film and television. Early life Law was born in Glasgow, the daughter of Meg "Mego" and William Law, a journalist. Prior to the Second World War, her fath ...

as Mrs. Watchit, Alexander's housekeeper in New York. *

as Flower store worker * Omero Mumba as Kalen, Mara's young brother. *

Yancey Arias Yancey Arias (born June 27, 1971) is an American actor. He played Miguel Cadena in the NBC series '' Kingpin'' and Gabriel Williams in the FX series ''Thief''. Life and career Arias's mother, Miriam, is Puerto Rican and his father, Tony, is Col ...

as Toren *

Laura Kirk Laura Ellen Kirk (born 1966 in Lecompton, Kansas) is an American actress and university professor. She is most known for her role in ''Lisa Picard Is Famous'' (2000). Career A graduate of the University of Kansas in Lawrence, Kansas, Kirk made ...

as Flower seller *

Josh Stamberg Joshua Collins Stamberg (born January 4, 1970) is an American actor. He was regular cast member in the Lifetime comedy-drama series ''Drop Dead Diva'' from 2009 to 2012, and later had recurring roles on '' Parenthood'', '' The Affair,'' and ''Wand ...

as Motorist *

Myndy Crist Myndy Crist (born February 5, 1971) is an American actress who has appeared in more than 50 films and television series. In 2019, she received a Jury Best Actress Award at the 2019 Riverside International Film Festival for her role in the 2018 fi ...

as Jogger *

Connie Ray Constance Ray (born July 10, 1956) is an American actress and playwright. Among her highest-profile appearances are ''Thank You for Smoking'' (2006) and ''Stuart Little'' (1999), and the television drama '' ER'' (1997). She also appeared in ''I ...

as field trip teacher * Peter Karika as The Trainer * John W. Momrow as

Fifth Avenue Fifth Avenue is a major and prominent thoroughfare in the borough of Manhattan in New York City. It stretches north from Washington Square Park in Greenwich Village to West 143rd Street in Harlem. It is one of the most expensive shopping stre ...

carriage driver * Max Baker as Mugger who kills Emma * Jeffrey M. Meyer as

Central Park Central Park is an urban park in New York City located between the Upper West Side, Upper West and Upper East Sides of Manhattan. It is the List of New York City parks, fifth-largest park in the city, covering . It is the most visited urban par ...

carriage driver * Raymond Hoffman as

ice skater * Richard Cetrone cameos as a Hunter Morlock. * Doug Jones cameos as a Spy Morlock.

Production

The film was a co-production of

DreamWorks DreamWorks may refer to: * DreamWorks Pictures, an American film production company of Amblin ** DreamWorks Television, an American television production company and division of the film studio ** DreamWorks Records, an American record label and f ...

and

Warner Bros. Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc. (commonly known as Warner Bros. or abbreviated as WB) is an American film and entertainment studio headquartered at the Warner Bros. Studios complex in Burbank, California, and a subsidiary of Warner Bros. D ...

in association with

Entertainment who obtained the rights to the George Pal original ''Time Machine'' 1960 and collectively negotiated the deal that made it possible for both DreamWorks and Warner Bros. to make the film. Director

Gore Verbinski Gregor Justin "Gore" Verbinski (born March 16, 1964) is an American film director, screenwriter, producer, and musician. He is best known for directing ''The Ring (2002 film), The Ring'', the ''Pirates of the Caribbean (film series), Pirates of t ...

was brought in to take over the last 18 days of shooting, as Wells was suffering from "extreme exhaustion." Wells returned for post-production. Filming began in February 2001 and finished on May 29, 2001.

Special effects

The Morlocks were depicted using actors in costumes wearing animatronic masks created by

Stan Winston Studio Stanley Winston (April 7, 1946 – June 15, 2008) was an American television and film special make-up effects creator, best known for his work in the ''Terminator'' series, the first three ''Jurassic Park'' films, ''Aliens'', '' The Thing'', th ...

. For scenes in which they run on all fours faster than humanly possible,

Industrial Light & Magic Industrial Light & Magic (ILM) is an American motion picture visual effects company that was founded on May 26, 1975 by George Lucas. It is a division of the film production company Lucasfilm, which Lucas founded, and was created when he began pro ...

created CGI versions of the creatures. Many of the time traveling scenes were entirely computer generated, including a 33-second shot in the workshop where the time machine is located. The camera pulls out, traveling through New York City and then into space, past the

ISS The International Space Station (ISS) is the largest modular space station currently in low Earth orbit. It is a multinational collaborative project involving five participating space agencies: NASA (United States), Roscosmos (Russia), JAXA (J ...

, and ends with a

space plane A spaceplane is a vehicle that can fly and glide like an aircraft in Earth's atmosphere and maneuver like a spacecraft in outer space. To do so, spaceplanes must incorporate features of both aircraft and spacecraft. Orbital spaceplanes ten ...

landing at the Moon to reveal Earth's future lunar colonies. Plants and buildings are shown springing up and then being replaced by new growth in a constant cycle. In later shots, the effects team used an erosion algorithm to digitally simulate the Earth's landscape changing through the centuries. For some of the lighting effects used for the digital time bubble around the time machine, ILM developed an extended-range color format, which they named rgbe (red, green, blue, and an exponent channel) (See Paul E. Debevec and

Jitendra Malik Jitendra Malik is an Indian-American academic who is the Arthur J. Chick Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at the University of California, Berkeley. He is known for his research in computer vision. Academic biography ...

, "Recovering High Dynamic Range Radiance Maps from Photographs, Siggraph Proceedings, 1997). The film's original release date was December 2001, but it was moved to March 2002 because they wanted to avoid competition with '' The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring'' and also a scene was removed from the Moon destruction sequence showing pieces of the Moon crashing into buildings in New York because it looked too similar visually to the

September 11 attacks The September 11 attacks, commonly known as 9/11, were four coordinated suicide terrorist attacks carried out by al-Qaeda against the United States on Tuesday, September 11, 2001. That morning, nineteen terrorists hijacked four commercia ...

Soundtrack

full score Sheet music is a handwritten or printed form of musical notation that uses musical symbols to indicate the pitches, rhythms, or chords of a song or instrumental musical piece. Like its analogs – printed books or pamphlets in English, Ara ...

was written by

Klaus Badelt Klaus Badelt (born 12 June 1967) is a German composer, producer, and arranger of film scores. He is known for his collaborations with Hans Zimmer, helping to write scores for dozens of critically acclaimed films including '' The Thin Red Line'', ...

, with the recognizable theme being the track "I Don't Belong Here", which was later used in the 2008 Discovery Channel Mini series '' When We Left Earth''. In 2002, the film's soundtrack won the World Soundtrack Award for Discovery of the Year.

Reception

Box office

The film grossed $22 million at #1 during the opening weekend of March 8–10, 2002. The film eventually earned $56 million in North America and $123 million worldwide.

Critical reaction

The film holds a 29% rating on

Rotten Tomatoes Rotten Tomatoes is an American review-aggregation website for film and television. The company was launched in August 1998 by three undergraduate students at the University of California, Berkeley: Senh Duong, Patrick Y. Lee, and Stephen Wang ...

based on 153 reviews with an

average rating In ordinary language, an average is a single number taken as representative of a list of numbers, usually the sum of the numbers divided by how many numbers are in the list (the arithmetic mean). For example, the average of the numbers 2, 3, 4, 7 ...

of 4.79/10. The site's critical consensus reads "This ''Machine'' has all the razzle-dazzles of modern special effects, but the movie takes a turn for the worst when it switches from a story about lost love to a confusing action-thriller."

Metacritic Metacritic is a website that review aggregator, aggregates reviews of films, TV shows, music albums, video games and formerly, books. For each product, the scores from each review are averaged (a weighted arithmetic mean, weighted average). M ...

assigned the film a weighted average score of 42 out of 100, based on 33 critics, indicating "mixed or average reviews". William Arnold of the ''

Seattle Post-Intelligencer The ''Seattle Post-Intelligencer'' (popularly known as the ''Seattle P-I'', the ''Post-Intelligencer'', or simply the ''P-I'') is an online newspaper and former print newspaper based in Seattle, Washington, United States. The newspaper was foun ...

'', who was somewhat positive about the film, wrote that it lost some of the simplicity and charm of the 1960 George Pal film by adding characters such as Jeremy Irons' "über-morlock". He praised actor Guy Pearce's "more eccentric" time traveler and his transition from an awkward intellectual to a man of action. Victoria Alexander of Filmsinreview.com wrote that "The Time Machine is a loopy love story with good special effects but a storyline that's logically incomprehensible," noting some "plot holes" having to deal with Hartdegen and his machine's cause-and-effect relationship with the outcome of the future. Jay Carr of the ''

Boston Globe ''The Boston Globe'' is an American daily newspaper founded and based in Boston, Massachusetts. The newspaper has won a total of 27 Pulitzer Prizes, and has a total circulation of close to 300,000 print and digital subscribers. ''The Boston Glob ...

'' wrote: "The truth is that Wells wasn't that penetrating a writer when it came to probing character or the human heart. His speculations and gimmicks were what propelled his books. The film, given the chance to deepen its source, instead falls back on its gadgets." Some critics praised the special effects, declaring the film visually impressive and colorful, while others thought the effects were poor.

Roger Ebert Roger Joseph Ebert (; June 18, 1942 – April 4, 2013) was an American film critic, film historian, journalist, screenwriter, and author. He was a film critic for the ''Chicago Sun-Times'' from 1967 until his death in 2013. In 1975, Ebert beca ...

of the ''

Chicago Sun-Times The ''Chicago Sun-Times'' is a daily newspaper published in Chicago, Illinois, United States. Since 2022, it is the flagship paper of Chicago Public Media, and has the second largest circulation among Chicago newspapers, after the ''Chicago T ...

'' scorned the film, and found the Morlock animation cartoonish and unrealistic, because of their manner of leaping and running. Ebert notes the contrast in terms of the social/racial representation of the attractive Eloi between the two films, between the "dusky sun people" of this version and the Nordic race in the George Pal film. Aside from its vision of the future, the film's recreation of New York at the turn of the century won it some praise. Bruce Westbrook of the ''

Houston Chronicle The ''Houston Chronicle'' is the largest daily newspaper in Houston, Texas, United States. , it is the third-largest newspaper by Sunday circulation in the United States, behind only ''The New York Times'' and the ''Los Angeles Times''. With it ...

'' writes "The far future may be awesome to consider, but from period detail to matters of the heart, this film is most transporting when it stays put in the past."

References

External links

* * * * * * * {{DEFAULTSORT:Time Machine, The (2002 Film) 2002 films 2002 science fiction films 2000s dystopian films 2002 science fiction action films 2000s science fiction adventure films American science fiction action films American science fiction adventure films American alternate history films Remakes of American films The Time Machine Apocalyptic films DreamWorks Pictures films American dystopian films Fictional-language films Films about time travel Films based on science fiction novels Films based on works by H. G. Wells Films directed by Simon Wells Films postponed due to the September 11 attacks Films set in 1899 Films set in 1903 Films set in 2030 Films set in 2037 Films set in the future Films set in New York City Films shot in California Films shot in Los Angeles Films shot in New York (state) Holography in films Films about impact events Moon in film Warner Bros. films American post-apocalyptic films Films with screenplays by John Logan Films scored by Klaus Badelt Films produced by Walter F. Parkes Films produced by David Valdes Science fiction novels adapted into films 2000s English-language films 2000s American films